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My understanding is France's electricity issues are mostly due to shutting down all their gas and coal power plants. As a result, the confluence of maintenance

My understanding is France's electricity issues are mostly due to shutting down all their gas and coal power plants. As a result, the confluence of maintenance and safety updates to the nuclear fleet are a greater issue effecting supply than they otherwise would be. Compare USA in 2021, nuclear provided 19% of electricity while having only 8% of total nameplate capacity. https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/what-generation-capacity https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/what-generation-capacity

xg15 4y ago
Many french power plants use nearby rivers as a source of coolant. A big issue last summer was that rivers carried not enough water to reliably provide cooling. Thanks to climate change, this situation will likely become more common in the future.
- trashtester 4y ago
  France's electrical grid has a vastly lower climate footprint than, for instance, Germany's, due to the nuclear plants. If it turns out that water supply remains and issue in future years (and was not just a fluke), I expect they will find ways around that (either by allowing sligtly warmer spill water or by using hydro dams to store more energy for the summer. Anyway, Germany and France are essentially the same grid, so differences in consumer prices tend to be determined largly by transport costs and the costs of neighboring countries. German power gets cheap when they can import from Scandinavia, Poland and Central Europe, and expensive when they have to export to those. French power is similarly affected by imports/exports to Spain, Italy and the UK. If you want to compare nuclear costs to other sources, you have to look at production costs for PLANNABLE energy for a conglomerate of sources, adjusted for risks and externalities (dry spells, reliance on dictatorships or other unstable or adverserial countries, market prices for commodities, pollution and climate change, etc). If you adjust for all externalities, especially polution and climate change, I'm convinced French electrical production is far, far cheaper per stable GW of output than Germany's.

xg15 4y ago

Many french power plants use nearby rivers as a source of coolant. A big issue last summer was that rivers carried not enough water to reliably provide cooling. Thanks to climate change, this situation will likely become more common in the future.

trashtester 4y ago
France's electrical grid has a vastly lower climate footprint than, for instance, Germany's, due to the nuclear plants. If it turns out that water supply remains and issue in future years (and was not just a fluke), I expect they will find ways around that (either by allowing sligtly warmer spill water or by using hydro dams to store more energy for the summer. Anyway, Germany and France are essentially the same grid, so differences in consumer prices tend to be determined largly by transport costs and the costs of neighboring countries. German power gets cheap when they can import from Scandinavia, Poland and Central Europe, and expensive when they have to export to those. French power is similarly affected by imports/exports to Spain, Italy and the UK. If you want to compare nuclear costs to other sources, you have to look at production costs for PLANNABLE energy for a conglomerate of sources, adjusted for risks and externalities (dry spells, reliance on dictatorships or other unstable or adverserial countries, market prices for commodities, pollution and climate change, etc). If you adjust for all externalities, especially polution and climate change, I'm convinced French electrical production is far, far cheaper per stable GW of output than Germany's.